Busy Weekend

Holy crap, what a busy weekend — especially if you count Thursday as part of it. Here’s the whole run-down.

Ignite Minneapolis

This was my third time attending Ignite. I left work a little early, took a bus home, and then took the van back to Minneapolis to catch the show. I had some free beer and food truck grub — my first time mixing alcohol with my ADD meds, and it seemed to be okay. I shut it down after the first beer, just as a precaution. Ignite was fun, as always, but I don’t know — it just doesn’t have the same magic that it did the first year. I think they need to bring back the digital displays that showed the Twitter conversation (hashtag, derp) on-the-fly while we discussed what was being spoken about. It was hilarious, fun, and a great way to find a bunch of new people to follow.

Friday

Friday was one of those crazy-assed days at work — I had nine meetings on the calendar and a lot to accomplish. When I wrapped it up for the day, it was with a great deal of relief. Went home, hung out with the wife and kids and generally tried to decompress a bit from my day.

Minneapolis WordCamp

Up early again. Went to downtown Minneapolis (again), and met up with a bunch of co-workers for WordCamp. It was my second experience — having hit the 2013 edition, but missing the 2014 one. As usual, it was a pretty good time. Met some interesting people, sat in a bunch of interesting sessions varying from dev, design, and content — and left wanting to create a bunch of cool stuff. As it stands, I’m going to start off light — with some nifty typography stuff and parallax pages to make a new theme using Underscore. This is going to be my new “bus project,” I think.

MN Ironman Ride

Oof. What a ride. I only ended up doing the 60-mile loop because I was exhausted after that first sixty, plus I wanted to be able to spend some time with my family this weekend. It was pretty chilly out, so I spent most of the day in tights/jacket/cool weather gloves. The new route, which reminds me of a charity ride I did a few years ago in the same area, is all hills, and it was a bit windy in places. I rode mostly alone through the first 30-some miles, and after the rest stop, I jumped into a paceline of twenty-some people, that was moving along at a good clip, before the hills really started. At the bottom of the first big climb, I was third wheel, and was able to respond to the climb nicely. At the top, I was in the lead group of three, something that surprised the shit out of me, really. We gained a couple people back on the descent before the next upturn. When we hit that I was feeling realllly good, even while other people started trying to push the pace, so two-thirds of the way up, I goosed the accelerator a bit to see what would happen, and I opened a gap. So I kept pushing. On the descent, I hit the big ring, tucked low on the bars, and hammered. The third climb, I was entirely alone. It felt absolutely amazing.

I opted to skip the second rest stop and push on for home. This turned out to be a mistake as I started to crumble and then bonked with about six miles left to go.

All in all, I cannot complain about the ride — I averaged almost 16 miles per hour on a course that absolutely decimated me a few years ago, I was climbing well, I was motoring in the flats well, and I passed more people than passed me.

At the end of the sixty, I was pretty cooked, so I packed it up and went home.

Wow

Pretty amazing weekend, really. Got plenty of mental and physical exercise. Then I got to spend about an hour and a half playing with my kids in a big pile of dirt, and after we put Sam to bed, I introduced Eddy to Lego for the first time, and we had a blast.